For small business owners, consumers, animal lovers – tips, resources, humor, innovation, contemplation, and head's up. Brought to you by an incurable information junkie on all topics imaginable.

If you’ve read my blog for any time, you will have noticed that I share solutions and resources. Before I started my blogs, I would email solutions and resources on a regular basis. I cannot NOT do it. It’s how I’m wired.

So today, you’re getting the full benefit of a solution and a resource.

I have two retail websites, ColdSoresBegone.com and CankerSoresBegone.com and use Paypal to process credit card transactions. It’s a real time-saver, but surprisingly, they don’t offer merchants such as myself the ability to offer customers a discount or promotion.

A fellow online retailer had the same problem and recommended what she did, register with E-Junkie.com. Among many of their services, they allow you to customize your cart, integrating it with Paypal, so discounts and promotions are easily managed just by logging into your E-Junkie account. E-Junkie.com charges me $5/mo for this capability.

I’m not knowledgeable about making changes on my retail website or shopping cart, and I knew I’d need someone to either walk me thru the set up or do it for me. E-Junkie has all kinds of help to offer but it’s only via chat. I needed more. They recommended Andrew, who works closely with them as the Lead Project Engineer for his own company, EasyE-Junkie.com.

I hired Andrew and he gave me an estimate of how long the job would take. He ran a little over that, but didn’t charge extra since that’s what he quoted. The prices at EasyE-Junkie.com vary depending on the service and time required, but generally $50/hour. Reasonable.

Have you ever had that rare occasion to work with someone who is such a pleasure — reliable, thorough, ethical, articulate, does all he can to save you money?

An E-Junkie.com staff member wrote this on Andrew’s website:

“We’ve got gurus, ninjas and support monsters at E-junkie helping our merchants, but when they are out of ideas, Andrew steps in. More than once I’ve seen him do things with our cart that I never thought were possible!”
Robin K. — E-Junkie

Apparently, he does everything from teaching people how to use, install, or configure the cart, to programming custom things to do with it. More details about what he does can be found here:

On RightOnTheWalls, we did the top-most Facebook/Twitter/Email header, the drop-down menus, the floating buttons on the right hand side, and everything related to the top three floating buttons on the right (we did the “Bulleten Board” feature, the “Design Custom Text” flash programming – this one is really cool, and the “Custom Photo Gifts” feature programming). Also, for any products that need to have a photo or design uploaded as part of the buying process, we programmed that.

On OneDiscMore, we designed and programmed the order form to accept all the order information for a custom CD/DVD production order with easy to use buttons, and we programmed the price calculation “engine” that calculates just how much a custom order costs before passing all the details to the E-Junkie cart.

For NarcissismCured, we programmed a number of custom features on their sales pages. First of all, the site uses “IP address-based pricing” which means that if you are in the US, it automatically prices your products in US Dollars, if you are in Canada, it prices them in Canadian Dollars, if you are in the EU Zone, it prices in Euros, etc… Also, if you click on any of the “add to cart buttons” (which we did custom for them as well), you will see in the cart overlay two “upsell buttons” at the bottom of the cart overlay. Clicking either button will add the specified product to the cart overlay without the user needing to leave the cart. We did those too. 🙂 Also, whenever someone buys a CD from this site, we programmed it so the order gets sent directly to their fulfillment company, Kunaki.com. So, their CD orders are completely automated. Also, when someone buys a product that comes bundled with a subscription to their free eCourses on relationships and Narcissistic Personality Disorder, we programmed it so the customer is automatically added to their email list with iContact.

On this site, we did just one thing. If you scroll down to the “add to cart” button, you’ll see that there is a checkbox next to text that reads “I agree to the terms & conditions”… we programmed it so the use *has to* check the box before they can add the product to the cart and make a purchase.